A disturbingly large number of young Americans go through their educations without hearing anything positive about the system of economic liberty commonly called “capitalism.” (Deirdre McCloskey prefers “innovism,” for some good reasons.) Almost daily, they’ll get some snide attack on it from faculty or administrative minions who are eager to turn them into social-justice warriors, and on many campuses, there is almost nobody to counter those attacks.
Commenting on this lamentable state of affairs is Duke University professor Michael Munger. In this article he writes, “We did not anticipate that the astonishing burgeoning of prosperity would cause, in dialectical inevitability, a backlash against inequality. We have abdicated our essential role of explaining the moral case for capitalism and spontaneous, decentralized institutions, and the political left has rushed in to take advantage of the vacuum.”
To make matters worse, Munger argues, many individuals who could be effective campus counterweights to the barrage of leftist cliches and calumnies have chosen to avoid hand-to-hand combat against statist propaganda in favor of a sequestered existence with little contact with students.
I like his conclusion that we need teachers and professors who will make the moral case for liberty — in Hayek’s words, “a truly radical liberalism.”
Read the whole thing.